In a recent post, I talked about some of the objectives we set for the design of a new proposal template, whilst briefing an agency with whom we’d been asked to work by one of our clients. Fonts turned out to be the most controversial aspect of the entire project.

In our detailed design specification, we set out a series of criteria for the ‘body text’ font.

1) It should ‘look professional’ and aid easy evaluation.

2) It should be serif. (That’s received wisdom in the proposal profession, and indeed features in many an exam for the APMP Foundation level qualification. Most – if not all – designers would agree with this for longer documents. But Times New Roman looks so dull!).

3) It should comply with the organisation’s brand guidelines. (Interesting one, that: most companies’ brand marketing policies are drawn up with an eye on brochures, advertisements, websites and letterheads: proposals don’t get a look in).

4) It must be a Windows system font. (Yes, some clients still ask for copies of proposals in Word. And no, we didn’t want to have to licence extra fonts for every proposal, or embed fonts which might not work perfectly for all readers).

Interestingly, there’s a school of thought that these four aren’t all entirely compatible with one another. Eventually, the agency ended up with Book Antiqua (too old-fashioned looking for some, but quite crisp on the printed page), in 10 point (too small for many, but fitting a decent amount of information onto each sheet). But I’m curious to know what others use, and whether other design agencies out there have come up with cleverer ideas.​

Fonts, like anything else in a proposal, all depends on your client. Most of the proposals I prepare are for engineering projects. Engineers are used to reading non-serif fonts. Also, most engineering proposals (especially regional governments) are page limited. So, for example, we will often use Ariel if our client uses Ariel in their documents. If I do need a serif font that works well with space, I’ll use Garamond.

Reply

Vivian Harris

3/26/2016 03:03:24 am

You nailed our problem to a “T”. Our proposal fonts are dictated to us by our company’s brand guidelines which were designed for brochures. Arial, 10 point, is our standard text font.

Reply

Jon

3/26/2016 03:03:35 am

Vivian – I have had success with marketing teams in the past by simply pointing out that they’d not taken proposals into account when agreeing the corporate standards (or, more subtly, asking what research they’d done into proposal design as part of the branding project – which usually gets them to admit that there was none). You can grab the moral high ground here quite easily – but it can be a challenge against often stiff opposition!

Jeannette – agree entirely re. making sure the fonts work well for the specific evaluators. In most cases, I’d like to hope that the corporate brand has already taken this into account; in many cases, I may be being unduly optimistic to think that’s the case! Certainly, changing the fonts for the specific customer (and indeed changing the whole layout / design) is very much part of the approach we adopt where appropriate. At the same time, I think most proposal teams need a baseline template to fall back on – which is where this debate originated, and where some of the fun starts. I do like Garamond, too!

Reply

James Heaver

3/26/2016 03:03:48 am

I disagree – I think that serif is not neccersary at all. It all depends on the context.
Serif fonts are definately easier to read, but can look cluttered and dark on the page. On one occasion we deliberately used sans serif fonts to actually slow the reader down – making them take time to consider our words mroe carefully.

The font we fell into using most commonly at my last company was Century Gothic. This is a very versatile fonts which can fit into many different styles quite easily. I wish I had access to my templates at the moment (we’re not running indesign here) to dig out some of the other fonts I liked.

Some fonts definately worth exploring are the bitstream (or vera) fonts – these are ‘open source’ so can be distributed freely. The serif font works particularly well in print at smaller sizes.

Regarding the style guide issue – I’ve been lucky, where I’ve worked the proposal department has also been the marketing department and has defined the style guide. Along with making it cover proposals aswell, we also had the freedom to play very loose with the style when neccersary.

Unusually we did have allot of respect and support at board level, which made this easier – and having delivered some breathtaking proposals in impossible timescales (as we’ev all done) in that regime it meant that our position was sealed.